Archive for December, 2007
Tuesday, December 18th, 2007
In an online discussion about why there are so few women in computer science, one student wrote that he thought it was because there are fundamental differences between the sexes. When asked what data he was basing that opinion on, he replied:
It's more of an unrefuted hypothesis based on ...
Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments »
Monday, December 17th, 2007
Via David Crow, a useful article on evaluating new product ideas. I'm not as focused on startups as most other DemoCampers, but this is a very useful checklist, and I'll be asking my students next term to answer these questions.
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Monday, December 17th, 2007
Andy Oram just finished a nice series of posts on online reputations (concatenated here). It's a fascinating topic, particularly when one starts to think about reputation "micropayments".
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Monday, December 17th, 2007
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Sunday, December 16th, 2007
The solstice is approaching, so it's time to count 'em. Do you remember how it felt the first time you:
implemented a for loop to find the length of a string, in assembly, and finally understood how computers actually worked?
read Software Tools in Pascal, and discovered that there was more to ...
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Sunday, December 16th, 2007
I received this a couple of days ago---regardless of whether some form of licensure would be a good idea or not, I think it's bound to happen eventually, and the IEEE will be a major player.
The IEEE Computer Society---the world's leading provider of technical information and services to the world's ...
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Sunday, December 16th, 2007
Via Adam Goucher: the Third Annual Conference of the Association for Software Testing (CAST) will be held in Toronto on July 14-16, 2008. The keynote speaker is Gerry Weinberg; the theme is "Beyond the Boundaries: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Software Testing". Coming as it does on the heels of the announcement ...
Posted in Announcements | No Comments »
Saturday, December 15th, 2007
I'm teaching two courses next term: CSC301 (Intro to Software Engineering) and a combination of CSC490 (undergraduate capstone project) and CSC2125 (graduate "topics in software engineering"). I'm hoping to do a better job with the former than I did this term, so I've started working on lectures. So far, ...
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Saturday, December 15th, 2007
Over on O'Reilly Radar, Nat Torkington recently posted:
According to a blog post by (update: a friend of) one of the developers, Amazon's SimpleDB is built on Erlang. Cool! Another datapoint for the trend we see towards parallel-capable languages like Erlang and Haskell.
"Parallel-capable"? I know the arguments---values in pure ...
Posted in Research | 11 Comments »
Friday, December 14th, 2007
The list of workshops for next year's International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'08) has been announced. The titles alone provide a lot of insight into what academic software engineering is interested in these days. They also show just how misleading it is to talk about "academic software engineering" ...
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